The Vent Core

Who am I?

[isr6599:~] wren% whoami
wren

Yes, there’s that. Facebook has the best summary of who I am so far.

I’m a undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign majoring in Engineering Physics. I’m a member of MacWarriors, the Webmaster for the Physics Society and on the observatory comity of the UI Astronomical Society. I find myself playing Clan Lord quite often (see the entry on phroon.net).

What is The Vent Core?

Here’s where it comes from:

The Wikipedia entry can describe it better than me, he’s what they have to say:

“Frog blast the vent core!”

This is a phrase synonymous with the series. Explosive BOB “simulacrums” occasionally shout the phrase, trying to blend in with the regular BOBs and explode around a large amount of humans. Since sometimes they are merely only piecing together random words, their nonsense can give them away.

Here is a quote from Doug Zartman, the man who performed the BOB voices, directly from the Marathon Scrapbook:

“The idea was that some of the assimilated Bobs become insane from their conversion and run around yelling nonsense. Alex said to me ‘say something random’, and that phrase tumbled from my lips. Totally spontaneous. While I could have sat down and thought up something more random than that, it worked out well, since it sounds close enough to a real sentence that it kept people guessing and generated some fascinating (and totally wrong) discussion about what the phrase was and its meaning. One popular theory was ‘God bless the Marine Corps!’, which was a fair guess, but still wrong.”

Aaron Snyder submitted an alternative theory on the Marathon Story Page ([2]):

I just watched your most recent “VidTip” film on “Bigger Guns Nearby” and think that I’ve found the answer as to what “Frog Blast the Vent Core!” from M2 means: along the way, you give map views of two interestingly-named areas: “BioVent Core #88A” and “BioVent Core #88B”. Between these areas is a raised hallway containing a BioBus chip (Hypervision power-up), but one can only get there by grenade-hopping.

Get it? Grenade-hopping might be renamed “Frog blasting.”

So, on this interpretation, “Frog Blast the Vent Core!” might merely mean “Grenade hop in the BioVent Core on ‘Bigger Guns…’!”

(“Grenade hopping” is a method of projecting oneself upwards by firing grenades downwards.)

It is very popular to say in the text chat of a networked Bungie game; meant more as a joke than anything; the sheer randomness of this phrase means it can be used at any time.

The phrase has appeared hidden in other games, such as Myth, Tron 2.0, and Oni. It is also hidden in Bungie’s homepage ([3]), which returns an HTTP header called “X-Blam” with the value “Frog blast the vent core!”.

One of the latter stages of Bungie’s successful Xbox game Halo involves the player (in green battle armour) shooting rockets or throwing grenades into the exhaust vents of a ship’s reactor core.

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Well, you came here, what does it mean?

Phroon is Michael Wren, or at least, his persona on the internet.

Phroon began as my character in a MMORPG known as Clan Lord. Here’s a picture of this Phroon.

As time went on, I had a hart time picking a login name for websites. Often ‘wren’ was already taken, so I soon began using ‘phroon’. The nexus of this journey occurred during summer of 2005 where I purchased phroon.net and phroon.org (phroon.com at the time was “Under Constraction” [sic], It now appears to be an arabic Yahoo look alike.)

I hope to one day own phroon.com, but I can wait.